Arts as outlet for those 'more apt to snap'

August 16, 2012|Chris Jones | Theater critic

Dr. Doriane Miller has written a play about youth violence. (E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune)

In the first instance, it was tattoos that began Doriane Miller's second career as an artist. That's not to say this sober-seeming South Side physician suddenly became interested in colored ink. It was that the designs on the arms of her patients changed, right in front of her face.

"For years," Miller said in a recent conversation at Tribune Tower, "most of the tattoos I had seen on my patients had reflected their aspirations and fantasies. But I was suddenly struck by how many young people were coming into my office with tattoos referring to the death of a loved one. These were like homemade tattoos — prison tattoos, some people call them — and they usually commemorated someone born in the 1990s. People do not always have a way to tell their stories. But these people were telling me their stories on their bodies."

So when Miller, a community physician who directs the University of Chicago's Center for Community Health and Vitality, would see one of those R.I.P.-type tattoos on a patient's arm, she'd probe a little deeper. Often she'd hear about a dead loved one. Just about as often, she'd hear that the patient himself had been shot, "maybe on more than one occasion."

"Now you or I would think of being shot as a fairly significant, life-changing event," Miller observed, rather dryly. "But when I'd ask my patients how they were doing, they'd just snap, 'I'm all right. Next question.'"

So there was a problem. Miller's patients wouldn't talk to her about what they really needed to be talking to her about, even though they often reported difficulty sleeping and other things that sounded to her a lot like collateral damage from a Chicago version ofpost-traumatic stress disorder. And yet she knew that without them talking about what they needed to be talking about, they were at increased risk themselves of being part of the very cycle of gun violence that had traumatized them in the first place.

Or, as Miller likes to put it, she knew her patients in this situation were "more apt to snap," and thus more apt to pick up a gun themselves.

In Miller's view, most of the gun violence horrifying the city and making its headlines this summer is not gang violence in the traditional sense of battles for territory, drugs and power, but petty personal disputes, little more than tiffs that escalate on a hot evening and are worked out by the previously traumatized and untreated. The parties to these disputes, she argues, are invariably stressed out, anxious and depressed from past incidents of violence, experiences that they've been unable and unwilling to talk about. And thus a cycle of destruction is perpetuated and then intensified by the dismal availability of mental health services in the neighborhoods where they most are needed.

If you ask Miller what the arts and artists can do to prevent gun violence in Chicago, her answer is much simpler and direct than you might expect. Get those who've been shot, or seen someone who has been shot, or loved someone who has been shot, talking. Right now. That's job one. The best way to make a dent in the murder numbers, she argues, is to offer a kind of creative therapy for those who don't understand the impact of past violence on themselves. In other words, she argues we fail to see that it's the traumatic aftermath of violence (not territory or control) that actually causes most of the new violence.

Miller quickly figured out that the typical modes of communication of the medical profession were of little use in this effort. PowerPoint presentations don't usually get people talking, nor do academic papers. So she decided to become a playwright herself, partnering with the venerable eta Creative Arts Foundation, which has long been working in this arena from its base at 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Miller's play, "It Shoudda Been Me," focuses on DeShawn, a 15-year-old Chicago kid who becomes depressed, and thus prone to violence, after his best friend is killed in a drive-by shooting. The play wasn't aiming for Broadway or prestige; it was specifically designed to get an audience to talk about itself.

By offering up a fictional character in a fictional scenario, Miller and her partners at eta have been able to provide a crucial safe distance to get folks to open up, even those who can't or won't talk about their own specific relationship to violence to a doctor or mental health professional. Disguise it as a chance to talk about a play, Miller says she and others have found, and people are far less reticent and more willing to open up about their own lives.

Miller and Phillip Thomas, president of eta, tell a story about one school audience that was asked how many of them knew someone who'd been shot. No hands went up. But when audience members were asked to talk not about themselves but about DeShawn, it was immediately clear that virtually everyone in the room knew someone who'd been shot.